My son and I came home one day to find a leaflet from our local Kingdom Hall. It was an invitation to their annual commemoration of Christ’s crucifixion tonight – April 14.
Do any of you know more about the JW’s beliefs about this? I tried searching their website a few years ago and was frustrated by what I couldn’t find there. My understanding is that they deny the divinity of Christ as well as His bodily resurrection.
Thanks for any knowledge you can provide.
Gertie the curious
The invitation was to what the Jehovah’s Witnesses call: “The Memorial of Christ’s Death.”
According to their understanding of events, Christ commanded that his death, not his resurrection, be memorialized. Like the Passover, the JWs believe this Memorial should be commemorated only annually.
On the night of the Memorial, Jehovah’s Witnesses assemble to hear a sermon which generally covers the following:
- Jesus died to offer a ransom to free humanity from sin.
- Jesus is now the mediator of the New Covenant between God and 144,000 human beings who replace natural Israel as God’s people.
- Only those who are of this select group of 144,000 may partake of the emblems of unleavened bread and wine (which are passed around at the end of the meeting).
- Only the 144,000 may hope to live in heaven where they will share in Christ’s 1000-year rule of earth.
- All others can hope to live under that rule on earth (they do not go to heaven)
- God began selecting this select group of the 144,000 in the 1st century.
- No others but the remaining ones of 144,000 may partake of the emblems since they are not in the New Covenant.
Up to now the Jehovah’s Witnesses have officially taught that “proof” that we are facing the end of the world can be found in the dwindling number of those who partake at their annual Memorial gathering. Around 1990 the number of Memorial partakers was around 8,800. The number of “remaining” ones jumped upwards of 5000 since to over 13,000 last year. Members of the JWs are assigned to watch and make a report of each person who partakes of the bread and wine at each Memorial gathering and send the report to their world headquarters in New York.
For almost a century the official teaching of the JWs was that God ended the call to become a member of the 144,000 in the year 1935. With little reason why, the current Governing Body (their main teaching group) has recently dismissed this teaching, even though they excommunicated many up till then who explicitly disagreed with the 1935 date.
The Divinity of Jesus as Defined by the Watchtower
They will claim that they do not deny the divinity of Christ, even though they do not believe in the Holy Trinity. Their official teaching to date has been that St. Michael the Archangel laid down his angelic life to be born as a perfect human through the Virgin Mary (yes “Jesus” doesn’t exist, it’s just St. Michael in disguise). Since angels can be said to be “godlike,” the Witnesses will claim that this means their belief in Jesus includes belief in his divinity. However they do not believe that Jesus is God, and their use of the term “Son of God” is limited to the English language use of “son,” namely an offspring and not the Semitic and ancient Roman use of the expression “Son of God” which meant an earthly incarnation of a deity.
No Bodily Resurrection Since Jesus is St. Michael the Archangel
They do indeed deny belief in a bodily resurrection. Their reasoning is that God’s justice demands the physical payment of a dead human to balance the scales of justice: a perfect human life to counter the sin of Adam who lost his human life. Therefore to them it is not the value of Christ’s shed blood but the literal offering of a dead human life that St. Michael was able to satisfy God’s justice with. The dead body of the human is part of the appeasement to Jehovah that must be included, they claim, otherwise the ransom will not satisfy.
If St. Michael was resurrected in bodily form, they reason, the archangel would have had to “take back” what he had “offered,” namely a perfect human form and life. Therefore “Jesus’” physically vanished in the tomb so Jehovah’s wrath could be appeased by his dead human form, but St. Michael came to life again as the archangel since he proved faithful and didn’t deserve to die himself.
They mistakenly refer to this “return to life as a spirit being” as “resurrection,” even though the Greek word for “resurrection” means a “physical reanimation” or a “standing up again” of a corporeal (non-spirit) person.
- taken from Revelation.
I can see it as even being blasphemous to some degree.